


Upon a Dreamer's Fancy

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Poltergeist: The Legacy
Genre: Background Rachel Corrigan/Alex Moreau, Found Family, Future Fic, Gen, Grief, Post-Canon, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 15:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20066014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Kat didn't go to Oxford with the intention of looking for Derek Rayne's ghost, but she found him there anyway.





	Upon a Dreamer's Fancy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariestess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariestess/gifts).

> I was so excited to see this show had been nominated and to get the chance to write for it for the first time, only, what, twenty years too late? I'd originally intended this to focus on Alex and Kat, with Kat as an adult coming to terms with everything that happened in the final episode and making a decision regarding the Legacy, but, uh, then I actually rewatched the final episode and caught feelings. This is the result, and I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> The title comes from the opening of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

**Upon a Dreamer’s Fancy**

** **

Kat had been having dreams about the Legacy House for so long now she’d forgotten when she first became consciously aware of them. Certainly long before she left San Francisco for Oxford, although it wasn’t until she flew back to the US that first Christmas that they really began to gather in strength.

She hadn’t even seen Angel Island during that visit – Alex and her mother had rented a secluded lake-front cabin for the holidays, and when her mother picked her up from the airport, they drove straight there.

Kat was tired from the long flight, and after the initial hugs and happy tears it felt like her mother kept bombarding her with questions: were her studies going okay, and was she eating well, and were there any guys on the scene. To which Kat’s respective answers were: ‘Yes’, ‘Mostly’, and ‘Yeah, right, like I have time for that’. Which wasn’t exactly the whole truth, but considering how spectacular their arguments over the college-decision had been, she thought it was probably safer to avoid giving her mother yet another thing to fret about.

She was pretty sure her mother knew she was lying, but then again if her mother thought she was getting up to normal college stuff, then that meant she probably wasn’t looking too closely at Kat’s reasons for choosing Oxford over an Ivy League school, and God knew that was probably for the best.

Her mother didn’t volunteer any information about the Legacy and Kat didn’t ask. She told herself she didn’t want to know, and while that wasn’t exactly the whole truth either, it’d do for now.

Things improved considerably when they reached the cabin and Alex came out to greet them, pulling Kat into a tight hug. Her dark curls smelled of rosemary and wood smoke, and were threaded through with more grey than Kat remembered. There were more questions, of course, but coming from Alex they didn’t seem quite so much like carefully laid bear-traps, so Kat didn’t mind. She answered as best as she could, trying not to sound too evasive. Mostly she didn’t have to be evasive; she _ was _ enjoying her course – Classics and English – and had made a loose network of friends, although she was a little unnerved by how much she missed America and her mother, not to mention the rest of her extended family.

"Home-sick?" Alex asked, holding her gently by the upper arms and studying her face. If her mother had tried that particular maneuver Kat would have pulled away, but it was Alex, so instead she shrugged and scrunched up her face.

"Yeah, a little, I guess."

"It’ll get better, Kat." To her surprise this came from her mother, pulling a box overflowing with Christmas decorations out of the trunk of the car. "And if it doesn’t, I promise I’ll come and visit."

"Maybe that’d help more if you didn’t make it sound so much like a threat," Kat said, and regretted it at once. She’d meant it as a joke, but there was still too much of the bratty teenager left in her system that it didn’t come out right. "I’m kidding," she said, and held out her arms for a hug. "Come and visit. Both of you. I’d love it."

Once upon a time, her backchat might have sparked an argument, but her mother seemed softer, some of the sharper edges smoothed away and some of the lines too. While Alex looked just the same as she ever had except for a few extra grey hairs, Kat’s mother actually looked younger and less careworn than Kat could remember seeing her in a long time. She’d always had a beauty that Kat had envied, particularly through the awkward years of puberty when her body had felt like an enemy turned against her, but there was a radiance about her mother now that seemed entirely new.

The cause wasn’t exactly a mystery worthy of either Sherlock Holmes or the Legacy; all it took for Kat to figure it out was watching Alex and her mother together. A few minutes of that and she knew their long tentative dance of courtship was finally beginning to pay off. About time. Apparently all the catalyst they’d needed was Kat’s absence.

And she was happy for them, really she was. She was exactly as thrilled as she should have been, because her mother had been far too lonely for far too long, and Kat was pretty certain that if anyone could make Rachel Corrigan happy, it was Alexandra Moreau.

It was just her damn luck that she walked in on them at the very moment they were about to kiss.

Nick had turned up early in the morning on Christmas Day, having managed to swing some time away from Precept business. He might have been hiding the weight of responsibility with dubious success, but he still treated her like his kid sister, even though they were both older and (Kat hoped) wiser.

Just like old times. Except that it wasn’t anything like old times and never would be again.

When they were all together, it was harder to ignore the empty space where _ he _ should have been, so she was already on edge when she walked into the lounge and caught her mother and Alex pulling apart, flustered and completely failing to look natural.

It was Boxing Day rather than Christmas Eve, but it was snowing outside, and every spare space of wall in the cabin was covered with decorations, and there was an instant when it all felt like the cruellest case of _ deja vu _ she’d ever experienced. Afterwards she hoped to God neither of them had noticed the expression of dismay that crossed her face just for an instant before she managed to clamp down hard on her emotions.

Godamnit, she wasn’t a grieving child anymore. And she was _ happy _ for them.

So she hid her shock and heartache – which wasn’t even anything to do with them anyway – and smiled and hugged them both, and they all cried a little, and then Nick came in and wanted to know what the hell was going on.

And that night she dreamed about the Legacy House.

After that it was as if she couldn’t dream anything else, which almost came as a relief considering what else she could have been dreaming about. She’d encountered more than her share of horrors over the years.

They weren’t nightmares, these dreams. She felt fear during the course of them, but when she woke they left her, not frightened, but with a deep sense of loss and welling grief.

It wasn’t the Legacy House that she remembered from her childhood, or even the house as it was now, rebuilt in a less grand architectural style. Instead, it was a version of the house that to Kat’s knowledge had never existed, the gardens grown wild, and the battlements left to crumble into ruin, starkly outlined against the crimson-streaked sky. The windows had become opaque, from the outside at least, and a cold finger scratched its nail down Kat’s spine at the thought that something – anything – might be staring out at her.

It looked deserted, but she knew with certainty that it was not. Her steps as she moved through the grounds were slow and hesitant. She found the security fence torn down and the gatehouse in ruins, barely visible beneath a mass of dying brambles, and the lake clotted with algae. As she explored she heard the occasional screech of something that might have been a peacock in the undergrowth. The air of desolation about the place was so vivid it was almost painful.

Countless times she visited the house and didn’t see another living thing, although she could never shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone, and gradually she started to become aware of a presence, a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of her eye that wisped into nothingness when she turned her head, or a reflection of flickering movement in one of the house’s blindly staring windows.

Gradually he took form, coalescing, his image becoming a little sharper each time she visited the house in her dreams, until eventually she turned the corner and saw him, as clearly as if he were before her in the flesh. He sat on a bench, his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers laced, with his face turned upwards towards the house. He looked like a desperately weary man deep in supplication to a higher power, and Kat froze. Or tried to, at least, but her feet felt leaden and unwilling to obey, as though she were caught in a current pulling her towards him.

Each time she dreamed, he drew her a little closer, and it was harder to resist the tug of the current, and she knew a time would come when she wouldn’t be able to fight it at all, when she’d have to face him and find out what he had to say and why he kept bringing her there.

If she was honest with herself, that time had been coming for a while.

** **

* * *

** **

Kat hadn’t gone to Oxford with the intention of finding Derek Rayne’s ghost (or not consciously at least) but she kept finding him there anyway, and usually when she least expected it. She’d stumbled across an old photograph of him as an undergraduate in an old copy of a student magazine she’d been idly flicking through, hadn’t even recognised him until she’d glanced at the caption, spotted the name ‘Rayne’ and felt her heart flip as she did a double-take, because holy crap, he’d been _ gorgeous _ and she really hadn’t been prepared to realise that. It felt weirdly disconcerting, that realisation, like finding old photos of your parents as teenagers, something which Kat wasn’t quite yet ready to admit wasn’t really so far from the truth.

In the photo he was dressed in black tie, clearly towards the end of some student function in which the wine had flowed freely. His bow tie was loose and hanging around his neck, and his hair was swept back, and he was smiling in a way that made her heart ache because she couldn’t remember seeing him smile like that, not once in all the time she’d known him.

She stared at the photo until she realised she was goggling, and then smiled wryly, because she’d assumed she was too old to still be blind-sided by a radical notion like ‘old people used to be young once’. Apparently not.

Not that there was anything supernatural about finding a photo of an old alumni in a university magazine, especially when that alumni was as distinguished as Dr Derek Rayne. It was a coincidence, nothing more, and she wasn’t going to kid herself otherwise, no matter how much she wanted to.

She’d seen nothing of the supernatural since she’d left the US, not even when she went to Connemara to visit the graves of her father and brother, a trip which she was careful not to let her mother know about.

The whole time it had felt like Kat was holding her breath, waiting for something to happen, but she saw no ghosts, no demons, only damp misty light and reminders of memories she could have done without. Seamus Bloom’s antique store was now a second-hand bookshop, and she stood outside for what seemed like an age until she summoned up the courage to go in, but even there she found nothing but shelves of Penguins organised by the colour of their creased spines and motes of dust dancing in shafts of light. She bought a gift for her mother, a book of poems by Patrick Kavanagh which she remembered her father reading, and escaped out into the street with a feeling of regret she couldn’t explain.

And now, back in a coffee shop in Oxford, sitting at a table which looked out onto a street filled with drizzle and grey English light, with rain sleeting against the window, she tugged the torn-out page of the magazine out from where it was tucked in the pocket in the back of her notebook. Derek couldn’t have been much older than she was now when this photograph had been taken, and still, despite his smile, it seemed to Kat that there was a darkness about him. Something about his eyes perhaps, a deep sadness she hadn’t noticed at first because of his smile and, dear god, those _ cheekbones. _ He looked, she thought, reaching for her latte without lifting her gaze from the photograph, like a man who was haunted–

"It’s Kat, isn’t it?"

Startled by the interruption, she tore her gaze away from the photo and stared up at the young woman standing next to her table. It took Kat a moment to place her as a third year student whom Kat had seen around the grounds of her college and, occasionally – very rarely – in the library, bent over a pile of books and feverishly scribbling. Presumably when an essay had come due. The woman’s curious gaze darted down towards the photograph and Kat quickly slid it back in the notebook, hiding it from view. "Hi..." she started to say.

Then a blast of cold air battered against them as the door opened and let in another group of tourists escaping from the rain, and belatedly Kat realised how busy the coffee shop was, and how lucky she’d been to get a table. Not to mention how rude she was being. She gestured to the free chair. "Do you want to sit down?"

"Oh god, no, I don’t want to intrude if you’re busy."

"You’re not intruding. And there’s nowhere else to sit, so..."

"Well, if you’re going to insist on twisting my bloody arm..." The young woman shrugged off her expensive-looking trench coat and draped it over the back of the chair. She sat down, and held her hand out with the confident poise of someone who clearly came from wealth. "Emily Levett."

"Kat Corrigan," she said, shaking her hand, but Emily Levett was smiling a wry lop-sided smile, and Kat knew something was wrong. Or… not wrong exactly, but off.

"The truth is," Emily said, "I already know who you are, Kat Corrigan."

"What do you mean?" But she already thought she knew, that maybe she’d known even before Emily sat down. It was there in her calm watchfulness, the feeling of rare power and strength around her that Kat had sensed in very few people. The ones who knew that there really was such a thing as monsters.

Emily didn’t reply straight away. She sipped her cappuccino, her eyes darting off, as if she was thinking, trying to determine what exactly she was going to say next, or how she was going to say it. As if she was already starting to regret taking a seat at this table. Kat felt a sense of something momentous gathering around them, the clamour of the coffee shop’s other patrons receding to a dull roar, so that there was nothing but this table and the rain forming labyrinthine patterns on the glass and the wisps of steam rising from their respective coffees. Then Emily’s eyes flicked back up, and there was a new light of determination in their depths.

"Perhaps it would be more accurate," she said, the words slow and deliberate and filled with meaning, "to say that I know who your mother is."

Too much to hope that this woman was one of her mother’s former patients. She should have been angry, Kat supposed, because she strongly suspected that this wasn’t a chance encounter, that this woman might have been watching her for a while, judging her, weighing her, and god knew if she’d passed their tests or if she’d been found wanting. She wasn’t angry, though. She wasn’t even particularly surprised. "You’re from the Legacy."

Emily smiled. It spread over her face slowly, a lazy rakish grin, entirely unabashed. "Guilty as charged. Well… I _ will _ be, at any rate. My father certainly is. And my brothers. And several cousins. What is it they say on that program about the two brothers who hunt ghosts? Saving people, hunting things..." She flared out her fingers around the coffee cup. "The family business."

Kat couldn’t help smiling back. "I’m not really part of that world anymore."

"No?" Emily tilted her head, studying Kat keenly. "Are you quite sure about that?"

** **

* * *

** **

He was waiting for her again when she went to sleep, and this time, no matter how desperately she wanted to slow her inexorable progress, she forced herself on.

He stirred at her approach, but he didn’t look at her. He seemed different, older than she remembered, his hair now more silver than brown, and the creases around his eyes had been scored even deeper. There was a deep vertical crease between his brows. It was a face on which a lifetime of worry had been written, a burden that was more than any one man ought to be made to carry.

"Hello, Kat."

She swallowed. "Hello, Derek."

He gestured to the seat beside him. "Join me."

His voice was quiet, calm and solemn, and she hesitated, thrown by how gentle he sounded. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected or what she’d feared. Anger or accusation perhaps, as out of character as those would have been, but never this quiet moment of acknowledgement between equals. As if they could ever have been equals, when he was a powerful psychic and the former Precept of a Legacy House, and she was _ nothing _. Just an out-of-her-depth kid who’d given up the one thing that made her special.

She hesitated, glancing up at the house before she took a seat. Close up, she could feel the malevolent energy radiating out from the bounds of its walls, as if evil had seeped up like damp from the tunnels that ran beneath it and spread through every brick and stone, suffusing the house’s fabric with evil. And there was something else, some strange trick of the light that caused a growing headache to pulse between her eyes: the longer she stared at the house, the more it seemed that she was staring at another building entirely, built from pale honey-coloured stone, and with no battlements, but many sloping roofs of red tile.

She closed her eyes, and when she looked again it was just the San Francisco Legacy House once more. The one that had never existed. And a dead man was watching her.

"Is this what it would have become if you hadn’t..." She hesitated, breaking off. Was he even aware the house had been destroyed? Or that he was dead?

"If I hadn’t destroyed it? Yes, this is a representation of what could have become of the Legacy House if it had fallen to the Dark Side. And what it could still become." He glanced at her, not quite smiling, his eyes creased at the corners. "And yes, Kat, I know that I’m dead."

For a moment, she couldn’t speak. His Dutch accent seemed stronger than she remembered, and his voice rougher, as if wherever he’d been, he’d had little reason to talk. "But you stopped it," she said finally, clinging to the first part of what he’d said because she couldn’t think too hard about the other yet. "The sepulchers..."

"If it were so easy to destroy the sepulchers, I would have done so long before I ever allowed this to come to pass. I tried to, many times." He gestured towards the house, and somehow managed to indicate not this warped vision of a place that never was, but the real house, the one he destroyed, sacrificing himself in the process. "No, I think it likely the sepulchers still exist, buried under several thousand tons of rubble and concrete. I pray that’s where they remain." His gaze sharpened, and Kat felt pinned to the chair by the intensity of his gaze. "The war against the forces of darkness is a war we can never truly win. It’s important you understand that, Kat. I didn’t, not until it was too late to extricate myself."

"I do understand." She was thinking of the roof of the Legacy House, of a monstrous thing wearing her brother’s form, of the weight of the key around her neck, so heavy it felt like it had been made of lead. Derek watched her, his intense expression softening, but she couldn’t look at him, couldn’t do anything but stare at the dark windows.

They reminded her of an obsidian scrying mirror she’d seen once, part of the San Francisco House’s vast collection of esoteric pieces, not dangerous exactly but not for public display in the Winston Rayne Hall of Antiquities either. It had been dark as an oil slick, and what light it reflected seemed wrong in some way Kat hadn’t been able to put her finger on, as though it were returning from very far away. In the windows she saw a flash of movement, a figure rearing up, indistinct except for eyes burning crimson, and she knew with certainty that it was Seamus Bloom. She wrenched her gaze away and laced her fingers together in her lap in an attempt to stop them from shaking, hoping Derek hadn’t noticed. He had, of course, although he was too polite to mention it.

"Why do you think you keep coming here, Kat?" he asked.

She heard herself reply, her voice faint. "Maybe I’ve been reading too much Daphne du Maurier."

"’Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ That seems apt." His expression turned mock-serious. "But wouldn’t that make me Mrs Danvers?"

It was the way he said it – the only way he ever told jokes, straight-faced deadpan quips that he was just slightly too self-conscious to pull off – that first made her laugh, and then caused a fist of grief to close around her heart and squeeze. That self-consciousness was the only crack she could remember seeing in his charming, self-assured façade, like jokes were an offering he was never entirely certain the other person would accept.

Her eyes prickled and she tried to swallow down the painful knot that had formed in her throat. She lifted her gaze to the sky as if somehow gravity could stop the tears from coming. Her lips twisted and puckered and she sucked in a breath, closed her eyes as the first sob escaped. She tried to speak but couldn’t; her chest ached too much, hollow with a deep well of heartache, all the years of pent-up guilt and anguish choosing this moment to tear free of her.

Derek hesitated then pulled her close, his hand resting against the back of her head, and it escaped from her in a rush, leaving her weeping helplessly against him, smearing his waistcoat with tears and snot like she was a child again. Some time passed before she could speak, only two words, and barely indistinguishable through her tears. "I’m sorry."

"Why?" he asked, although he knew; of course he knew. And still it was a long time before she’d composed herself enough that she could speak without her voice shaking. She pulled away, ducking her head and wiping her eyes as surreptitiously as she could.

"For that year. For everything I did. Everything that happened with..." Her voice broke on the name. She had to close her eyes and force it our through clenched teeth. "...with _ Miranda _. You all wasted so much time chasing around after me, when you should have been..."

"Hunting down the forces of darkness?"

She couldn’t speak, nodded instead, her gaze darting towards him.

"Miranda Rhodes was part of what the Legacy is sworn to fight against. Tell me something, Kat. If you had resisted her, what would she have done?"

She hesitated, wiping her cheeks. "Found someone else."

Derek nodded. "And we might not have been able to stop her in time. An innocent life would have been lost."

She had no answer for that, only shook her head, unwilling to accept the sop of comfort, his things-happen-for-a-reason bullshit. It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.

"But then," Derek continued softly, "this isn’t really about Miranda Rhodes."

Kat shook her head, not trusting herself to speak, and this time he didn’t make a move to fill the silence. Instead he waited, and the silence stretched on, growing in intensity and weight, until she felt like it was crushing her, until she could hear her blood pulsing in her ears, the hollow ceaseless thrum of her heartbeat. When she finally spoke, resenting him for dragging this truth out of her, this secret she’d kept hidden for eight years, her unwilling voice was hoarse with tears.

"I gave away my magic," she said. "Even when Miranda was… gone, I had power, _ real _power, and I rejected it. But if I hadn’t..." She forced herself to look at him. "Could I have prevented this? Could I have stopped you from dying?" He stayed silent. "Please, Derek. I need an answer."

"I can’t give you an answer, Kat. The truth is I don’t know. It’s possible."

She exhaled, short and hard, as if he’d punched her in the solar plexus. It felt like he’d done exactly that. But what exactly had she wanted? Reassurance that there had been nothing she could have done to save him? In other words, for him to lie, because with that sort of power she could have done anything if she’d had the chance to learn how to use it.

She still remembered how it had felt. She used to dream about it, before the dreams of the Legacy House took over: dreams of being borne aloft on a shimmering ocean of golden light, the waves gently caressing her, and voices whispering every time her head slipped beneath the surface, voices that spoke of everything she could do, everything she could be, power and pleasure and wealth and all there for the taking if she only opened her mouth and drank. She’d wake with the taste of honey on her lips, and it was beautiful, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen or would ever see, and how could something so lovely and alluring be anything but entirely good? She’d never seen anything like it before or since, alien and savage and wonderful. And terrifying too, but by then Kat had gotten used to being scared.

"_Kat._" Derek’s insistent voice broke into her thoughts, drawing her attention back to him. "Magic like that, power that comes not from within, but from external forces, it always carries a terrible price. I would rather have died a thousand times over than seen you or your mother succumb. You were right to give it up. If you’d left it any longer, it might not have let you."

"You talk about magic as if it’s alive."

"Isn’t it?" He said this quietly, simply, and she glanced at him, unnerved. He met her gaze, his own steady, although his expression had tightened. "It changes people, twists them until they’re no longer recognisable, to their loved ones and to themselves. I have seen it happen to people I love."

"Your father?"

He gave a rough jerk of his head. "Amongst others. Too many others. If I’m certain of anything, it’s that you made the right decision. One that many adults far older and wiser than you are now might not have been able to make, and you were a child. You’re stronger than you realise, Kat, and when nothing else remains you still have your gift."

"No. I don’t. I don’t get visions anymore. I haven’t, not for years. Not since I rejected my powers."

"Kat..." He stared at her, seeming, for what felt like the first time she’d known him, almost at a loss for words. "Do you think visions are the only way a gift such as yours can manifest?" And when she didn’t answer, he lowered his voice, gentler still. "What do you think _ this _ is?"

"A dream," she said. "And you’re… a representation of my guilt and childhood trauma." But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She knew that this was real, and that the man before her, whether he was a vision or a ghost or something else entirely, was Derek Rayne.

He looked amused. "Of course. You are your mother’s daughter, Katherine Corrigan, always ready to rationalise the seemingly impossible. Do you truly believe that?"

She shook her head. "No. No, you’re real."

"Good. I’m glad we agree on something."

"Just… I wish I knew why you kept bringing me here," she said in frustration, and he sighed.

"I’m afraid you’re mistaken. This place is none of my doing. It is you who have been bringing _ me _ here."

"Why?"

He lifted his hands. "For answers? Or perhaps because you want something from me that is not within my power to give."

She frowned.

"Forgiveness," he told her. "I cannot forgive you because there is nothing to forgive. Nothing of what happened was your doing. You cannot be held accountable, no matter how the voices in your head tell you otherwise. You were not to blame."

"I wish I could believe that."

"I know you do. I felt the same way after my father died. I blamed myself, tormented myself with everything I might have done to save him. And I also know there’s nothing I can say to convince you otherwise."

"Does it get better?"

He hesitated a fraction of a second before replying. "In time."

Which struck Kat as evasive, but she didn’t push it. Instead, she swallowed, took a breath. "The Legacy have approached me. The London House."

He nodded. "I suspected they might."

"Really?"

"I would have tried to recruit you myself once you were old enough. That is… if I hadn’t been so terrified of your mother. You have a powerful gift, Kat, one that will make you a target. It may be that you will be safer in the Legacy."

"Only ‘may be’?"

"You’ve seen enough to know that being part of the Legacy can itself put a person at risk. As much as I wish we could have protected you from that, it might be for the best that you realise that before it’s too late."

"I think it’s already too late," she said numbly. Her gaze shifted back to the house, felt again that sense of somewhere else, of the world shifting around her, merging into something else, somewhere else, of honeyed stone and red tiles and elaborately stylised gardens. "Derek, have you been to the London House?"

"Of course. Many times."

"What’s it like?"

"It’s an old building, much older than the San Francisco House, built by a former Precept in the sixteenth century on the site of an abbey that was torn down during the Dissolution. Consecrated ground. Or it was once."

Kat turned her gaze back towards the house. She could see the other house more clearly now, sharpening into focus as the San Francisco House faded, but the sense of all-pervading evil remained.

"Something’s coming, isn’t it?" she said. "Something bad."

"Listen to me, Kat." Derek leaned forwards urgently, and gripped her hand. "You can always walk away. You’ll tell yourself otherwise, but it isn’t true. You can _ always _ walk away, lead a normal life–"

"Could you have walked away? How about Alex or Nick? Or my mother. She talked about it often enough, but it’s over a decade since you found us in Ireland, and guess where she still is." He didn’t answer. She swallowed, and her voice cracked as she continued, "Anyway, normal’s overrated."

He squeezed her hand. "You truly are a remarkable young woman, Kat Corrigan."

"I guess I really am my mother’s daughter," she said, and then groaned. "She’s going to kill me."

"I wish I could reassure you otherwise," Derek said, "but I’m afraid this is one of the few times I’m relieved that I’m already dead."

And again that barely perceptible hesitancy. _ God _ , she thought, _ how desperately lonely he must have been. _

"You don’t think that’d stop my mother, do you?" she said, and his mouth twitched at the corner. "Derek, can I ask you a question? After what happened, Mom said that in the days leading up to it, it was like you knew it was coming..." She glanced at him. "But did you know before then? Like… a long time before then?"

He held her gaze gravely for a long moment before he inclined his head. "Yes."

"When you were at Oxford?"

"Yes, I knew then. And before. A part of me has always known."

She nodded, swiping her hand across her cheeks. And it was as if her life unspooled ahead of her, forking into two paths. One led to a life which could be described as normal, the sort of life her mother wanted for her, and the other… Well, that was anything but normal. She wondered if there had been a moment like this for Derek too, a moment when he’d see a chance to change the course of his life and if he’d been tempted, even if just for an instant, to take the other path. She’d loved him – and _ still _ loved him – just as she loved Alex and Nick, the other members of her extended family, but there had once been a time when she’d hated Derek in a way she’d never hated them, hated him with the terrible helpless rage of a betrayed child who’d lost a father twice in less than five years. She hadn’t been able to understand what he’d done then. She was starting to get it now, though.

Kat drew a ragged breath and released it. "Thank you, Derek," she said quietly. "For coming when I called."

"Always," he said, and then he was gone. The house – or houses – lingered a few moments longer, then faded into the mist that had rolled in off the bay. With them went the sense of gathering evil, and the tension in Kat’s shoulders eased. She could sense the tug of her slumbering body close and impossibly far away all at once, waiting for her soul to return. She resisted, and sat gazing into the mist for a long time, thinking things through.

She’d never quite understood the reasons why she’d chosen Oxford over the colleges closer to home, only that it had felt like the right thing to do, a way of atoning for the part she’d unknowingly played in bringing about his death and for blocking whatever might have come of the kiss between Derek and her mother that Christmas Eve long ago. That was the one thing Kat did not and never would regret, even if it hadn't been for her mother's new-found happiness with Alex, because if she was certain of anything it was that Derek Rayne would have broken her mother’s heart.

She’d told herself that she wasn’t going to Oxford in search of him, knowing even before she left that it was a lie, knowing that of course that was _ exactly _ the reason why she was going there, because she was haunted by Derek’s death and always would be and maybe she could find some answers somewhere far away from her mother’s probing questions. But that didn't seem quite like the whole truth either.

Perhaps she hadn’t gone there looking for him. Maybe she’d always been waiting for _them_ to find her, and Derek had only ever been a distraction.

Chasing after a dead man’s ghost. How had the London House seen that, she wondered. Had they taken it as a sign of vulnerability, a signal that she was weak, or merely that she still had a continuing interest in the Legacy and might be amenable to joining in the future? The answer, she assumed, depended on just how far they had fallen to the dark side.

Jesus. She’d dangled herself like bait on a hook and waited for them to bite, and she hadn’t even realised she was doing it.

You can always walk away, Derek had told her, and she wondered whether he’d believed it, or if he’d already known that she never could, no more than he could have done. If so, she had to give him credit: he’d hidden his resignation well.

The tug of her body was growing more insistent. She’d have to return to it soon but in the meantime she recalled every scrap of memory back to her mind, uncertain how much she’d be able to remember when she awoke and she wanted to cling on to every detail: the clean scent of his cologne, and the texture of the waistcoat against her cheeks, and the weight of his hand on the back of her head as he comforted her.

He’d always been so good at that. She’d been terrified that first night in the Legacy House facing down the thing that had worn her brother’s face like a ragged mask, but she’d been with Derek, and no matter how frightened she was, his presence had made her feel safe. Like she had the strength and the courage to face whatever might be coming.

Kat hadn’t felt that way in a long time, but she felt it now. It was as if she’d been relieved of a heavy burden that she’d been lugging around for what seemed like forever.

She felt like a traveller refreshed after a deep and restful sleep, ready at last for the longer harder journey yet to come.


End file.
